[Editors' note: the article below is David Horowitz's defense of Matt Sanchez, a Marine corporal and Columbia student, who is now the target of the Left's campaign of personal destruction.]

I am generally a forgiving soul. If treated half-decently by my opponents I am prepared to overlook many of their indecencies because I understand they come from a place of self-righteous zeal that often overwhelms their better judgment and inspires them to be nasty and dishonest in their service of their political agendas. After all, they’re saving the world.

It is their delusional fantasies of social justice that not only prompted progressives to invent the “politics of personal destruction” but to resort to it as their first and often only weapon. It is also what inspires them to have so little loyalty to community or country, and no respect at all for the truth.

Max is the latest in a line of Blumenthal character assassins who invent the facts to feed their malicious designs. His father once compressed four lies about me in a single sentence. I don’t know if Sid actually instructed his son to continue the dirty work he had begun on my case, but one day little Max showed up on my political doorstep so to speak.

By now I have lost track of how many times he went into print or onto the web to defame me but his last column falsely cast me as the godfather of the ABC miniseries “Path to 9/11” in order to misrepresent it as a right-wing anti-Clinton plot. In fact, the ABC producer who fought hardest for the film was a gay liberal who voted for Clinton (to whom the film was overly tender). As for myself, I was not even aware of the film’s existence until after it was completed. These Max mistakes were bad enough. But when I posted a response correcting the errors, he simply ignored it.

When Max Blumenthal shoves a camera or microphone in your face, as he did mine at the recent CPAC convention, he has no interest whatsoever in reporting the facts, or even in spinning actual facts afterwards. His agenda is to put words in your mouth and use them against you. Character demolition is his business and he has no respect whatsoever for the truth. Naturally, this is not exactly visible to the viewer, because of the way he cuts the product. You don’t get to see him ramming his words down your throat. You just get to see the effort to spit them out. By the time we reached the point in our non-conversation where he asked me what motivated the Left, I was pretty stoked. I explained to him that leftists are driven by envy and resentment and a self-adoring sense of themselves as social redeemers. This is what explains why Max’s heroes have murdered tens of millions of innocent people whose misfortune it was to get in the way of their salvational schemes. After our non-interview was over, I gave Max a copy of a Monster – a pamphlet about progressive icon and mass murderer Che Guevara. It’s the last shot in my YouTube segment.

When I was ambushed by Max, I happened to be standing next to Matt Sanchez, a Marine corporal and Columbia student who had been harassed by Columbia Marxists from the International Socialist Organization. These bozo progressives who wanted to were keen to save Saddam Hussein and fervently believe that Islamofascists are freedom fighters while American soldiers like Matt Sanchez are servants of the Great Satan. This does qualify, Max, at the very least, as treason of the heart.

Yesterday, Max filed a column on these episodes at The Huffington Post. The column quoted sources in the gay Left “outing” Matt Sanchez with the revelation that 15 years ago, he was a gay porn video star and alleging that he was a male prostitute, as well. As conservatives know from first-hand experience, viciousness – the politics of personal destruction– is the progressive middle name. There is no conservative outing machine. The invasion of a person’s privacy – the reckless disclosure of private information that could potentially have untold consequences on a person’s career, relationships, friendships, and family – are all easily justified if you are a Progressive, of course, because you are on a mission from God: to save the world. That’s how the Gestapo worked and the Khmer Rouge Marxists, and that’s how Max and his friends work, too. It’s all for the good of the cause. In fact, it’s required by the good of the cause. The more noble the cause, the more people you can justify destroying to make it a success.

For the record, I have no particular concern about adult pornography and personally could not care less what Matt Sanchez did with his life when he was a young man. Who among us is without pieces of their lives, or without actions in their past that they did or did not do, that they now regret? Unlike Max, moreover, Matt Sanchez wasn’t born with a silver spoon up his ass. He didn’t have an insufferable daddy to inspire him to be a verbal assassin or to connect him to like-minded intellectual thugs so he could make a good living at the same time.

If pornography doesn’t involve children, it’s what Progressives like to call a victimless crime, and therefore not a crime. I happen to agree. I think pornography should be regulated and kept from children and criminalized where children are involved, to protect their innocence. I also respect religious people who consider pornography sinful and even religious people who think that any female flesh visible, even ankles, is pornographic. But I don’t agree with them. The American freedoms that Max and his friends find so oppressive are about this diversity, too.

I find it appalling that people who actually call themselves Progressives would attack an Hispanic American and accuse him of being an exploited minority because he chose to serve his country. I find it appalling that gay leftists – who otherwise think Bush is destroying the constitution by tapping the phones of our terrorist enemies – would open an American citizen’s buried past and make it public in an attempt to destroy him. But I’m not surprised. That’s what the Left does. All day and every day. It’s for the cause.

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